Swan’s Down Cake Flour put out a pamphlet in 1944 describing their new “Mix-Easy” method of cake making. And I’m all about finding a new (to me) cake recipe!

LUSCIOUS COCOA CAKE

Preparations:

Have the shortening at room temperature. Grease pans, line bottoms with waxed paper, and grease again. Use two 8-inch layer pans or an 8x8x2-inch pan. Start oven for moderate heat (350° F.). Sift flour once before measuring.

Now the “Mix-Easy” Part:
Mix or stir shortening just to soften. Sift in dry ingredients. Add brown sugar. (Force through sieve to remove lumps, if necessary.) Add 1/2 of milk and the eggs. Mix until all flour is dampened; then beat 1 minute. Add remaining milk and the cocoa-water mixture, blend, and beat 2 minutes longer. (Count only actual beating time. Or count beating strokes. Allow at least 100 full strokes per minute. Scrape bowl and spoon or beater often.)

Baking:
Turn batter into pans. Bake in moderate oven (350° F.) about 30 minutes for layers, or about 55 minutes for 8x8x2-inch cake.

I have to say, I was skeptical of this at first. Mixing flour into the butter directly — whaaaaat? Part of the creaming process is punching little air pockets into butter (or shortening), and flour is much too fine; the granulated crystals of sugar “fluff” the fat.

But they did publish this pamphlet, and it does look really easy. Not quite a piece of cake (ha! ha ha ha! … ha?), but worth trying.

Dry ingredients, wet ingredients — it would be a muffin or quickbread batter if the butter wasn’t already mixed in.

But a minute of beating later, it looked appropriately fluffy. This new (well, new in 1944) method just might work!

Thirty minutes later, they came out of the oven and looked pretty darn good. Not very poofed up, but not collapsed (or burnt). Plus, they smelled very chocolatey.

In terms of texture, this was more dense than I would typically expect in a from-scratch recipe. The chocolate flavor helped offset that, and its texture ended up being really rich and concentrated instead of unpleasant. It was much like a double-layer brownie with icing.

The only thing I didn’t get a chance to evaluate was the “keeps longer” assertion — cake never stays around our house long enough to test that, and we shared this with friends. Good retro recipes don’t need to worry about longevity!

Scans and typing-in of the recipe come from Recipe Curio, still one of my favorite resources for a wide assortment of cool vintage recipes, both advertised and homemade!

]]>https://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2016/11/21/happy-thanksgiving-4/feed/1retrochefthanksgiving2016Humphrey’s Beef Soup, Home Madehttps://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/humphreys-beef-soup-home-made/
https://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/humphreys-beef-soup-home-made/#commentsMon, 01 Aug 2016 08:00:20 +0000http://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/?p=5282The major party presidential candidates named their running mates in July, so this month we are featuring a vice presidential recipe. It comes to us from Hubert Humphrey, who served from 1965-1969. Humphrey was a staunch supporter of civil rights, even when much of the Democratic Party’s support still came from southern racists. After sixteen years in the United States Senate, President Lyndon Johnson picked Humphreys as his running mate.

Dissatisfaction over the Vietnam war forced Johnson to withdrawn from the presidential race in 1968, and Humphrey replaced him as the candidate of the Democratic establishment. Robert Kennedy emerged as his closest rival, and there might have been a very contentious convention had Kennedy not been shot that summer. However, the media have always tended to overstate how close Kennedy came to getting the nod. It would have required a substantial number of nominal Humphrey supporters to defect for Kennedy to have carried it. In any case, Humphrey won the nomination, but his campaign was deeply wounded by the images of police facing off against antiwar protesters, and he lost narrowly to Richard Nixon.

Humphreys was the last strongly progressive Democrat to come close to winning the presidency until the 2000s. His loss has been seen by many political observers as a key development in a decades-long move to the right in American political culture. Humphrey’s strong support for civil rights marked the permanent end of the South as a Democratic stronghold in presidential elections (although the disappearance of the Dixiecrats from Congress and state government took far longer). The loss of southern whites from the New Deal coalition ended the progressive expansion of social programs that had been so important from the 1930s to the 1960s, beginning with the New Deal and culminating in the Great Society.

Humphreys was only fifty-seven when he lost the presidential election, and in 1971 he returned to the Senate. In a twist of irony, he replaced Eugene McCarthy, who had also sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1968. It was McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary that had forced President Johnson to withdraw from the race. McCarthy, having turned against the party establishment, stood little chance of being renominated for the 1970 Senate race, and practically none of being reelected, so he retired and Humphreys took his place. Humphreys served until his death in 1978, during which he was given the title of deputy president pro tempore, in honor of his previous service as Senate president.

HUMPHREY’S BEEF SOUP
HOME MADE

1 1/2 lbs. stew beef or pieces of chuck
1 soup bone

Cover with cold water in heavy 3 quart sauce pan. Add salt, pepper and two bay leaves and heat to bubbly stage. Then turn the heat very low and add the following:

This soup or stew is almost a full meal in itself. It is very thick and full of good vitamins and energy. Generally, a good fruit salad, saltines, coffee and dessert is all one needs for a wonderful supper.

This seems like a recipe aimed at people who already had a pretty good idea how to cook soup.

I’m never sure how much liquid to add when it says it’s supposed to be enough to cover the meat. Am I supposed to spread the meat out on the bottom of the pot, then cover it with just enough have it all submerged? (No, I know that’s not right, since I’ve tried doing it that way, and it was not nearly enough liquid.) This time, I dropped the stew beef and the rather bulky bone matter in adjacent heaps and added enough that they were about a centimeter underwater. Then the recipe calls for salt, but it doesn’t say how much. I don’t really know how much salt to add, and the question isn’t helped by my having only a rough idea how much water I just put in. So I added a little to start and kept putting more in as it cooked, until I could finally find the amount that tasted right near the end.

The vegetables went in and mostly disappeared under the water. I was getting anxious that there might be way too much liquid. Vice President Humphreys had said that this was supposed to be thick, almost like a stew.

It seemed silly to pull the meat out and cut it up, but the batch of stew meat we had used contained some unusually large chunks. Moreover, after two and a half ours on the stone, several long strips of meat had fallen completely off the soup bone. So I fished around for any hunk of meat that seemed uncomfortably large and hacked them down to bite-sized pieces. (There was also a lot of connective tissue in the strips from the bone, which were cut off and given to the dog.)

The recipe says “tomatoes,” and we already had canned diced tomatoes in the pantry, but we figured the recipe meant whole tomatoes. After plopping them in, it was obvious that this was the wrong decision. The whole tomatoes floated to the top like bloated red balls, clearly vastly too large for a single bite. So after they had simmered for about half an hour, and the whole soup was nearing completion, we pulled them all out and cut them up into bite-size pieces, just like we also had done for the stew beef.

In the end, it was almost like a stew, which was a surprise given how liquid the soup had seemed through almost all of its cooking time. The broth is rich and flavorful, the variety of vegetables all played well together, and it does indeed make a hearty centerpiece of a meal. The beef itself was somewhat bland, since it was not separately seasoned or browned or anything before being added to the soup.

This selection from Political Pot Luck: A Collection of Recipes from Men Only (1959) was shared online at The Awl.

This Fourth of July also coincides with our regularly scheduled “political” recipe Mondays. We decided to do a bonus double recipe, starting off with a quick kid-friendly sandwich:

Meet Frankie Doodle Dandy. Sitting on a blanket of American cheese, he rides in on a toasted English.
…Make Frankie Doodle Dandy by splitting Swift Premium Franks. Dip into boiling water until “arm & legs” spread. Build sandwich and top with frank. Wrap in foil and grill for 10 minutes. Decorate as pictured.

Hilarious, right? Toasted English, ha ha ha! Really, this recipe appealed to me only because of the simplicity and kid-oriented design.

In any case, Frankie Doodle Dandy is being followed up with Barbara Bush’s Red White and Blue Cobbler.

Place blueberry pie filling in bottom of 8 x 8-inch glass baking pan. Spread evenly and then place the cherry pie filling on top, smoothing to edges of pan. Place in 400°F oven to heat while preparing topping.

In a saucepan, mix dry ingredients. Gradually stir in juice from canned cherries and cook until thickened, adding cherries and flavorings at the end. Smooth cherry filling over blueberry mixture. Keep hot while making topping.

The elder President Bush tends to attract a lot of nostalgia these days. He is looked back on a respectable sort of Republican leader. He was conservative, bellicose, and eventually wildly unpopular, but to nowhere near the extent his son was. His wife, Barbara, was also the most popular First Lady of the later twentieth century. Barbara Bush was a very traditional president’s wife. She had essentially no public policy role at all—nothing to do with drugs, or cancer research, or obesity. (Apparently, her official pet cause was battling illiteracy.) She was perceived as a “stay in the kitchen” type. Nobody thought she was stupid, but she was never a prominent presence in the political arena (although she was known inside the Beltway to be significantly more liberal on most social issues than her husband). She welcomed foreign leaders but did not debate with them. The Weekly World News once took an official White House publicity photo from a rose garden event and painted her solid white, claiming the pale figure was actually an alien meeting with the president.

There was a bit of debate as we were making this as to whether Barbara Bush would every really have made it. Certainly, Mrs. Bush could cook and did much of the time when her children were young, before her husband was a national political figure. However, she also famously admitted that she had not cooked at all during his twelve year as vice president and president. So there is a pretty good chance that she never actually made this dish, although she probably had it cooked up for her family.

There are two versions of the recipe, and you can make the whole thing with canned ingredients. However, since it’s peak fresh fruit season right now, we really wanted to make all of this from scratch. The farmer’s markets have been overflowing with blueberries and cherries are on sale all over the place—the perfect time for a berry-cherry cobbler. So we used fresh sweet cherries, rather than canned pitted fruit.

The two homemade filling recipes are similar, and once you’ve made it a couple times, cornstarch fruit fillings from scratch are pretty easy. Heat, stir, done!

The two layers of the fruit filling are not particularly thick, but they are gelled enough to stay (mostly) separate. (Buzz, being red-green colorblind, could not tell them apart in the final product. I barely could either.)

For the topping, I used butter instead of shortening. BECAUSE BUTTER IS DELICIOUS.

After the topping was ready, I plopped it on in little bits. It sort of had to be flicked off the fork to get it in place.

The top was nicely browned after baking for twenty-five minutes. We took it out and gave it some time to cool—just enough time to make the hot dog entree.

The little hot dog men were fun to slice up, although Buzz cut one a little two close at the waist and left the poor fellow barely holding together.

It only took a couple minutes in the boiling water for their limbs to separate.

We plopped them all in a heap, which the four-year-old thought looked absolutely hilarious.

Honestly, we weren’t quite sure how we were supposed to wrap the sandwiches in foil and “grill” them for ten minutes. So we just laid out the American cheese on the split English muffins, mounted the Frankie Doodles, and slid it under the broiler for a couple of minutes — just long enough to melt the cheese.

We added a bit of extra decoration to our little dandies: a tri-corner hat cut from a black olive, facial features of mustard, and a American flag made of pimento and parsley on the other side of the sandwich. Isn’t he adorable!

(The four-year-old, who had been anxiously awaiting his hot dog dinner, was extremely displeased with the pimento. Earlier, he had kept asking where the buns were, and it was a relief that he accepted that the “buns” were actually English muffins. He even liked the cheese. But pimento was horrifying. He cried and refused to listen when we told him that his hot dog culd have ketchup on it instead. Ultimately, he would not even come to the table and eat until the rest of us were all almost finished. He did love his dinner in the end, though. JUST LIKE I HAD SAID HE WOULD.)

While he was being obstinate, the rest of us were discovering that the Frankie Doodle Dandies were pretty tasty. There was a little tension between the hot dog and American cheese flavors, but it worked reasonably well; a little extra mustard and the pimento added some nice variety when eaten all together.

Frankie Doodle Dandy can also be decorated to represent a slightly more authentic version of Revolutionary War soldiers, if you’re a silly 9-year-old boy. And then you can amputate various injured limbs. And then your (vegetarian) sister can complain about your battlefield surgery. And then the toddler can start demanding more ketchup so his Frankie Doodle Dandy can look like that.

The point being, it’s a fun family dish.

Once we were done with the main course, it was time to get back to the cobbler, which had been sitting in the middle of the table throughout the meal. It remained pretty cohesive when we spooned it out (about as good as you are ever going to get with a cobbler), and it was really tasty. Everyone liked it, and the two different fruit flavors blended very nicely together. Several people had second helpings; it was all gone by the next morning. We had actually not bought any vanilla ice cream to provide the “white” for the recipe, but Buzz pointed out that we had a few Klondike bars in the freezer. So we cut one open, scooped out the vanilla, and laid it atop the cobbler — which only further improved the flavor. Obviously, Barbara Bush hired good people to cook for her.

Yinzerella of Dinner Is Served 1972 has once again collected retro bloggers and arranged for us all to swap pie recipes with one another. And once again, I see no reason to pass up an opportunity to (a) get a new recipe to test and (b) eat pie.

Because DUH, IT’S PIE.

We were randomly selected to make Mai Tai Pie, a recipe from The Thatched Kitchen Harvest & Holiday Cookbook (1972), contributed to the pie pool by Kelly at Velveteen Lounge Kitsch-en.

Cool and light, the flavors of lime and rum are distinctive in this coconut crust pie.

Combine coconut and melted butter, tossing with a fork to combine. Press over bottom and up sides of 9-inch glass pie plate. Bake in a preheated 300°F. oven 25 minutes until well browned. Cool.

Meanwhile, drain pineapple well reserving all syrup. Add water to syrup to make 1 1/2 cups liquid. Sprinkle gelatimn over liquid in a small saucepan. Stir in sugar, salt, lime peel and juice. Heat mixture to boiling, stirring constantly until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat. Beat egg yolks until foamy. Gradually pour hot mixture over eggs, beating constantly. Stir in rum and Cointreau. Chill mixture about 40 minutes to consistency of unbeaten egg white. Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form. Fold into gelatin mixture until well blended. Whip cream until stiff. Fold cream and pineapple into gelatin mixture. Turn into pie shell. Chill two hours before cutting. Garnish with twisted lime slices and cherries to serve.

When I was in the liquor store shopping for Cointreau, I couldn’t find it. I asked the one of the helpful store clerks, who gave me a slightly weird look. My first paranoid thought was, oh no, I’m pronouncing it wrong, and I started to flash back to 8th grade French class, reviewing how all the letters went together, debating whether I should try saying it again, saying it differently, or just grin cheerfully until he said something — when he pointed to the bottle directly to my left, clearly labeled COINTREAU.

Whoops.

We were pretty excited to try this. Plenty of booze in the pie, and bright tropical flavors.

The crust needed to be put together first, with (yay!) plenty of butter.

It baked beautifully golden brown, and then sat aside to cool.

Then it was time to start getting into the real fun of a vintage pie…

Gelatin!

Gelatin with plenty of pineapple and lime juice and sugar. At this point, it was tasting pretty darn good.

And then we added booze. Whee!

I was the most proud of this part. I didn’t just slice up limes for decoration — I candied them! Boil citrus in sugar for fifteen minutes or so, and you get a treat that makes any citrus lover (like me) very happy.

Use pasteurized eggs! These don’t get cooked, just whipped and folded in.

SCHLORP.

GLOOP.

After chilling and solidifying, it was ready to serve.

This is just gorgeous, isn’t it? I’m really proud of those lime slices, and that twist in the middle!

Sadly, I was a little less pleased with the flavors. It definitely tastes like a Mai Tai cocktail, with lots of extra cream. But the crust should have been sweeter, and the filling could have been (I can’t believe I’m about to say this) less boozy. It wasn’t a really strong “ooh I’m gonna be drunk” punch, but it did taste more like alcohol than lime or pineapple or even sugar. So this gets a “meh” — but I’m happy enough with it that I’m curious to tweak the recipe and bit and see if I can get those flavors more balanced.

But this Pieathalon is still a huge blast, and I’m thrilled to have participated for the third year in a row. For more pie-tastic tastiness, take a look at these other fine bloggers!

]]>https://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/pieathalon-mai-tai-pie/feed/21serving-pieceretrochef1463926597157recipe1recipe2ingredientsbuttercrustpineapplegelatinlimeymixingcandied-limesfolding1folding2fillingserving-pieWatergate Saladhttps://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/watergate-salad/
https://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/watergate-salad/#commentsMon, 06 Jun 2016 08:00:16 +0000http://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/?p=5193A couple of weeks ago while shopping for Puddin Cookies ingredients, we were debating what our next politician recipe attempt ought to be. The universe delivered us an easy option: Watergate Salad, right on the side of the pudding box.

Of course, this recipe doesn’t have anything directly to do with the thirty-seventh president (nicknamed “The Embattled President,” according to the deck of presidential trivia cards in my fifth grade classroom—I don’t think that was really a nickname, just what diplomatic newsmen ended up calling him a lot. “Tricky Dick” was probably too inflammatory to make it onto the card. My teacher that year had actually bought the deck for the class so that we could copy the presidents’ pictures and the embroider them into a quilt. I ended up drawing and stitching a very large Nixon head at part of the project.) The dish is named after the Watergate Hotel, which was somewhat famous as a hotel long before its name became synonymous with “scandal.” The fine accommodations were why the Democratic National Committee decided to locate their offices there.

During the 1972 presidential election, G. Gordon Liddy, a right-wing loon and Nixon campaign hanger-on, came up with the idea of burglarizing the DNC headquarters, as part of his Operation Gemstone dirty tricks campaign. The goal was to find out what dirt the Democrats had on Republican candidates. The White House Plumbers (a group of Cuban exiles used to “stop leaks,” through such wizardry as breaking into the office of the psychiatrist who happened to be treating Daniel Ellsberg, the man to leaked the Pentagon Papers) broke in and tried to tap the phone of the DNC chairman, but they instead ended up tapping a phone in a minor side office that was most notably used by DNC staffers making discreet calls to prostitutes.

This was all done without the direct knowledge of president Nixon, although it was approved by his top legal advisors. (Let that one sink in.) What doomed Nixon and most of his inner circle was that they tried to cover up what had happened—that, and the unprecedented fact that Nixon had decided to bug his own offices. The Nixon tapes have been a gold mine for political historians, giving insights into both the ordinary operation of a presidential administration and the uniquely dishonest character of Tricky Dick himself. I saw only recently that somebody had noticed part of one conversation on the tapes whose irony had previously not been appreciated. As things were unraveling, Nixon wanted somebody to find out who the legendary leaker codenamed “Deep Throat” actually was. So he ordered the best men onto the job—Deputy FBI Director Mark Felt.

Nixon’s presidency ended in utter disgrace, and that should always be what people remember the most about him. In terms of policy, he was a very conventional mainstream Republican, not part of the Goldwater-Reagan conservative movement that came to dominate the Republican Party. His longest-lasting impacts were in foreign policy, where he moved toward more cordial relations with the communist powers and in establishing the “southern strategy”; that meant subtly advertising the Republican Party as a new home for racist white southerners, who had been Democrats for a hundred years but whose racism and conservatism were increasingly out of step with the national Democratic Party.

But who cares about one of the most disgraced leaders of American history? Let’s try this Watergate Salad (which Jell-O claims has nothing to do with the Watergate Scandal, despite being created around the same time).

Dump everything in a bowl and get ready to mix? That’s all I have to do? Wow, this is easy.

(Plenty of time to write up an extensive Nixon bio for the beginning of this blog post.)

The four-year-old was absolutely amazed by the color change when enough liquid hit the pudding mix. “It’s GREEN!” he screamed, and ran laughing from the room to tell Daddy that it had turned green.

Much like the Watergate break-in, this “salad” is a little bit nuts. If I’d left out about half the marshmallows and let the pineapple feature more prominently, it would have felt more like a creamy fruit-nut salad than a green sugar bomb. But as a dish, this just screams 70’s — the color, the flavor, the mix-and-done approach… and the name of the hotel that made the decade so interesting politically.

I don’t have that. I have all of two vintage serving platters, and they’re mundane patterns.

Oh well. We’re really about the food, anyway…

We didn’t have any parsley on hand (the garden is still in progress!) but a generous sprinkle of paprika helped make the plate look prettier.

Creamed tuna (or creamed chicken) is never a particularly fancy meal, although it is satisfying and filling. Universal opinion was that the noodles (with the cream sauce) were more interesting than the tuna part, and all the kids wanted seconds of pasta while declining more creamed tuna. It was barely worth the trouble… especially without that serving plate!

Based on how simple the recipe is, and how much Bisquick one box holds, we decided to try a few different flavors of pudding: chocolate, butterscotch, and pistachio.

At the first mention of “cookies”, the two youngest children magically materialized in the kitchen. “Cookies? Where are the cookies?” And for a change, they were both willing and able to do the recipe themselves.

I didn’t even need to help with egg breaking.

The youngest’s favorite part was squishing the dough balls into cookie shapes. I gave him a mug and he cheerfully smashed them, then kept begging that I make more dough for more smashing.

Luckily three flavors of puddings meant three batches, and there was plenty of smashing for him to do.

These are fairly tasty cookies, assuming you pick flavors of pudding that you tend to enjoy. Pistachio was my favorite, Buzz liked butterscotch, and the kids were most interested in the chocolate. The primary downside is that they’re moderately greasy, leaving an oily residue both on the cookie sheet and any napkin they sat on for a while.

This is an ideal quick cookie snack, and kids can make it themselves (especially if you trust them to use an oven.)

And then you remember your daughter is a pescatarian, put the ground beef back in the grocery meat case with a quiet sigh, and pick up some cans of tuna fish instead. Because thanks to retro advertisements, you can make almost anything with tuna.

I did make “chili sauce” from scratch — ketchup with a splash of brown sugar, vinegar, and tabasco — rather than buying a bottle from the store of something I’d basically never use again.

MAYONNAISE. And stuff.

Frying is where things started falling apart — literally. It took a lot of careful work to keep them mostly intact, and then some reassembly after cooking. Luckily, it will get hidden under a bun…

These were great! The coleslaw on top was an ideal garnish — a bit sweet, nice and crunchy, and a perfect complement to the tuna patty. And it’s actually a light, fresh taste that can work better for summer meals than a heavier beef burger. Worth considering the next time you want something on a bun, but maybe don’t want to light up the grill…

The tuna burgers are one of three Hellmann’s recipes shared online by Jamie on Flickr.

]]>https://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/tuna-burgers/feed/1servingretrochefrecipeingredientsaddinsfryingHot Fruit Casserolehttps://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/hot-fruit-casserole/
https://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/hot-fruit-casserole/#commentsMon, 02 May 2016 08:00:00 +0000http://retrorecipe.wordpress.com/?p=5151Strom Thurmond is a legend in South Carolina politics. What kind of legend is a matter of debate though. A staunch opponent of integration and miscegenation, who fathered a child with his family’s teenage African-American housekeeper; the longest-serving Republican Senator, after starting in Congress as a Democrat; a man with a creepily oversize statue on the statehouse grounds. But whatever else he was, he was a consummate politician.

During the 1970s, Thurmond put out a family recipe booklet as part of his campaign. His second wife, Nancy, compiled a number of recipes and added the name of various South Carolina towns.

Always conscious of nutrition, Mrs. Thurmond recently compiled a cookbook of favorite family recipes and photographs which she hands out on the campaign trail for her husband who is seeking re-election. According to the 32 year old former beauty queen, the recipes come from family members and friends, and all utilize South Carolina products. Each recipe is named for a South Carolina town which were campaign stops of the Thurmond entourage. — “Thurmond Family Recipes“, The Sumter Daily Item, September 7, 1978.

I don’t think the names of the towns attached to the recipes actually meant anything. They were just there to point out that Strom Thurmond knew his way around the entire state—and to spell out an acrostic.

Hot fruit casserole — essentially, fruit cocktail baked with fat, sugar, and spices — is apparently a relatively common dish in the South. Travelers Rest Hot Fruit Casserole is just a hot fruit casserole named after Travelers Rest, a very small town that would be unknown except it’s on the way into the North Carolina mountains… and was included in a recipe in Nancy Thurmond’s collection. Other than the name, there are no interesting variations in this version (While researching this dish, I saw versions with macaroons, almonds, or pecans included to add texture and variety).

This has the classic vintage recipe “open lots of cans” feel, but a spicy new kick. We didn’t feel like using fresh fruit. It’s spring, and tree fruit isn’t in season. The pears you get from the store in April are either hard or mealy.

Wow, three teaspoons of curry powder? SO SPICY… (not)

We did have a bit of trouble picking out the right casserole dish for this. Too small… too big… finally we just settled on something that was slightly too small but managed to pretty much hold everything. We also doubled the cherry allotment, so we could fit one cherry in each fruit half.

The sauce was pretty grainy when we had to pour it on. The curry and brown sugar were never going to dissolve in just melted vegetable fat.

After baking for an hour, the peaches and pears had released quite a lot of juice. No worries about inadequate sauce — there was at least a cup of liquid released by all that fruit!

WELL!

Hot fruit casserole has a great balance of sweet and spicy. All the brown sugar may not be necessary (depending on your personal preference), but don’t bother cutting down on the spice. You might even add some ginger as well. It makes canned fruit into a whole new experience.

I can only imagine that nuts or macaroons would make it even more awesome.